dfischer

Hi All, I have been playing around with blender for a while and so far i can made a pillow and some other shapes that dont represent to much. I find it really hard to find good tutorials for sculpty anything in blender. I really would like to learn how to make a basic sculpty shoe, i have been attempting to make a simple flat ballet shoe but no matter what i do it just turns out rubbish. I have trawled the internet looking for a sculpty shoe tutorial but there is nothing out there, only maya stuff i can find. The problem is i really dont know where to start. For instance if i use blender i am assuming i will have to make the shoe in two parts, a sole and an upper? Im not even sure how to have two objects in one blender grid, i mean i know u can use layers, should i be doing that? i could really do with some pointers here, some advice from some of you experts out there would really be great. If anyone knows any sculpty shoe tutorials that would be great. Please if you think you can give me some advice i would really appreciate it a lot, thanks :-)

Tya

Its all trial and error...practice practice practice

Samantha Fuller

Not having mastered blender myself i can be only of limited help. In SL shoes are often made of a texture that is applied to the foot part of the AV mesh and 1 or more prims that also have texture(s) this can be confusing because the texture will be represented as a shoe icon in inventory and the prim(s) as a box icon. this will be further complicated by the sculpt map being a texture or material & UV map in blender If you need to visualize all the parts togather you can download the av mesh form the SL website and tear off the lower leg mesh to paint the texture part of the shoe on their are a collection of boxes at the bottom of the blender UI that act as a layer selector and you could put this mesh on its own layer. Remember that once you have a square UV map for the sculpt mesh you can't change it(the UV map) or add or subtract pixels to that mesh. You can create more meshes for extra prims (sculpt and regular) and you can create another UV map for the regular texture and assign it to the same mesh, as to how to keep everything organized and correctly assigned i still haven't figured out.

Beebo Brink

/me heaves a deep sigh

This is why I never got very far with my own boot project. I spent some time learning how to work with Wings in general, but had no clue had to proceed to make something like a shoe shape for export to SL.

I know to start working with a sphere, but the process beyond that is a complete mystery. One piece, many pieces, solid or hollow? I've seen intricate prim building, that makes sense to me, but sculptie shaping is a mystery so far.

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Jackal Ennui

1. Read up on alternate topology sculpties, it's documented in wiki.secondlife.com and the official forums somewhere. (Basically with a script you can use different base prim types than just spheres for sculpties. Using a torus base type enables you to have a sculptie with a hole)

2. I don't know if Blender natively allows exporting of sculpt maps, but even if it does, consider installing Wings3D and the exporter script. Reason being, there's a .zip archive with templates for Wings3d that are correctly UV mapped, and come in various topologies, so basically if you want a sculptie on basis of a torus, open the torus template in Wings3D, export as .OBJ file, open the .OBJ file in Blender, sculpt away, save, open in Wings3D, export as sculptie. It's more steps but the advantage is that you're starting from an object that has the correct number of vertices to be exported as a sculpt map. Of couse you could start from scratch in Blender too.

3. Sphere type sculptie for the sole (flatten it) and torus type sculptie for the upper part, the ankle goes through the hole. Flatten the sides, push it out on one side (that's where the toes go), pinch it together a bit on top. Using regular prims for the sole is feasible too. High heels: might be a good idea to use two sculpties, one for the sole, one for the heel. Of course you can mix regular and sculptie prims.

4. As far as I know, Blender doesn't use layers. You can just add new objects to the scene and they will "live" in the same space (and save to the same file). Press the space bar, "add mesh", select a mesh type. Or File > Import, I think. Haven't used Blender for a while now, it makes me cranky.

5. Export every sculptie as a separate texture map and put them back together in SL. Might take a bit of fiddling around.

6. When you sculpt, don't add vertices - don't extrude, cut holes, subdivide etc. Otherwise it won't have the required geometry for export as a sculpt map. Treat it like a surreal lump of clay - you can't add material, and you can't add more holes than it already has.

7. Read forums.secondlife.com and wiki.secondlife.com and there's probably some good advice on sluniverse.com

8. There's no need to import the Sl avatar into Blender to shape the shoe around its foot. As long as your sculptie is vaguely shoe-shaped, you can resize it at will in SL to make it fit properly. (I make only one sculptie, and the different shoe sizes are resized directly in SL)

9. ???

10. Profit.

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Lassitude & Ennui - fine shoes & jewelry
at onrez and in-world on sim Nouveau

Beebo Brink

Thank you, you have given me hope after all.

dfischer

Awwww thankyou so much for your responses. Jackal you have given so much information i now feel like i actually could get somewhere thankyou very much for your help :-)))

Aki Shichiroji

It does support layers, actually - It works generally along the same principles as you've described here and can be flipped between by hitting the number keys at the top of the keyboard ( rather than the keypad).

And yeah, the Blender interface is a pain. (I can say i've seen worse though :B)

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Lan Tatham

Well, I think that any 3D application that at least has a decent set of features be not too easy to learn. It's true that blender has its quirks, however it's not that they are insurmountable.

Miriel Enfield

Dear God, what could possibly be worse than Blender? Were the buttons each in a different language, or completely blank?

Raindrop Drinkwater

Poser and Bryce are worse than Blender, imho.

I actually quite like the Blender interface, now that I'm used to it.

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Miriel Enfield

I know what all of these words mean, and yet these sentences make no sense.

Aki Shichiroji

I don't find Blender that bad now that i've gotten used to it because i'm coming to understand that everything has a purpose in Blender, and it's possible to reorganize much of it in a manner that best suits you. Understanding and becoming comfortable with the various hotkeys is also of vital importance. Everything has a tooltip too, so if you're just finding your way around, hovering over each button will help too.

As for what I've found to be worse? Hm. Toon Boom Digital Pro, while supposedly a professional level animation program used by lots of the major animation studios... is maybe on its second or third iteration, but has a terrible interface that features sometimes up to 7 windows to keep track of... and much of its advertised features are still broken. It has aspects i like, but for the most part it makes me grumbly.

Thunderclap

11. Bow to Jackal for solving my pressing boot sculptie problems!

Thunderclap

We must give you the cure now! That virus has affected you brain. I am callin 911 and if you can hold on I can get a doctor to stop those bad, bad, blender hallucinations.

Thunderclap

Machine language!

Muze

You're a godsend You solved a major problem for me.

Vertigo Paris

You've been assimilated!

Working with Poser and Bryce took almost no time at all for me. I quite enjoyed working in both programs and have been fiddling around with them recently to get the creative juices flowing again.

Blender on the other hand, it took me a week just to grok the various controls and that was even after taking several tutorials on it. I finally chalked it up to that I was not meant to work with sculpties and accepted my defeat.

Seeing some of the work some of my favorite designers produce though fill me with envy while at the same time making me appreciate them all the more!

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Quote:

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Jackal Ennui

Hehe, quite the necropost, but glad it's still of some use! I'm afraid though that some information may be woefully out of date, maybe someone can chime in with updated info. I think the topology change can be done from the build interface now (instead of using a script).